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Eon: The Throne of Discord (Fall 2009)
In which the party, barely having recovered from meeting (and losing) some old friends, run into even older friends...and promptly decide to celebrate by spending some quality catch-up time together in the Ruins of Eldergrin. Episodes Episode One: It Kinda Was Chess Notation :Battered and bloodied from the previous season finale, Ethan, Ashra, and Claire find themselves in the Ruins of Eldergrin with Mister Bait Snugglesworth. As they stand amidst the carnage of the previous battle, a buzzing sound heralds the arrival of a swarm of bloodmotes, from which they flee into the ruins. Once they emerge in a promisingly bloodmote-free location, the party hears the sounds of someone running up the tunnel ... this unfortunate person is summarily knocked out with a rock by Claire. Upon awaking, Kruglor grabs Claire and transports her to another plane with his dimension die, at which point she does her best "innocent little girl" impression and gets back on his good side. :Once they return, the reason Kruglor was making time down the tunnel becomes clear: a boneyard running after him. Kruglor ends up surfing on the boneyard while Fab Dick uses Gust of Wind on it to great effect. Kruglor eventually transports it to the Elemental Plane of Air, instantly destroying it, and returns with an armload of femurs and, courtesy of a 2, a saxophone which no one in the party can identify as a musical instrument. Boneyard defeated, Kruglor, Baudin, and Fab Dick sign company contracts. :The party returns to town to restock, during which Baudin and Kruglor decide to take a joyride on Kruglor's dimension die. They first end up on a deep level of Hell, where Kruglor barely evades death at the hands of a balor and nearly manages to hit it in the crotch with a saxophone before returning to the Prime Material Plane. They then travel again to a plane containing sentient evil avians which they dub "giant evil chickens" and attempt to ride, driving them slightly insaner. They then transport these beasts to Mechanis, where they leave them in the gears before returning home. Meanwhile, Ethan, Claire, and Ashra go shopping and buy a wand of Cure Moderate Wounds, which is almost as thrilling. :Shopping completed, the party returns to the ruins sans Mr. B. S. and discovers a giant chessboard made of petrified creatures. They eventually discover that they need to win the game for Black in order to unlock the door within the chessboard, and after one slipup and use of a save point, manage to make the stairs into the ruins open... :(Note: How did Baudin show up? Did Fab Dick go along on the joyride?) Episode Two:'' No, Honey'' :With the ruin staircase fully open, the party sets about searching for treasure in a typically paranoid fashion. After discovering a step which is Snake, another full of scrolls, another full of holy symbols (one of which is summarily defaced by Kruglor), and one full of enough alchemists fire to blow up a hell of a lot, Claire gets freaked out by the whole "almost died in a firey explosion" thing and the party proceeds cautiously into the next room. :They are greeted by six doors, each with the symbol of a different god. Claire prays to Olidamarra for fun, causing spikes to crash down from the ceiling. Everyone runs away in terror except for Fab Dick, who identifies a clear illusion and stays in the room to laugh at everyone else. Screaming over, the party returns to the room as Ashra investigates the fake spikes on the ceiling and accidentally touches the very real forcefield which had been holding a large amount of water out of the room. Everyone but Ashra and Fab Dick escapes, though Ethan becomes waterlogged and can only crawl up the stairs. Claire, Snake, Kruglor, and several Ethan-provided skeletons go after Fab Dick and Ashra; Claire assists Ashra (while discovering that illithids, or at least one illithid, have legs, or at least one leg) while Kruglor acquires ... the femurs from two of Ethan's skeletons. Kruglor and Fab Dick dimension-die their way to the Underdark for a breath of fresh air, demonstrate the usefulness of the Dark Elf Silent for "Don't tase me, bro" and return with lungs full of air, which they use to swim out. As the water reaches the alchemists' fire, Claire backflips off of Ashra to get out of the way, and the entire party is finally on dry land. :The party decides to rest in the stone steps while they wait for the water to recede. During the night, Claire has vivid nightmares while Ethan talks to the wall again, and Ashra and Fab Dick notice ghosts resetting the chess puzzle and thus trapping the party in the ruins. : The party awakes to find that the room ahead of them has dried out, and go down to check the doors in more detail. After extensive consultation with The Map, they opt for the door with Olidamarra's symbol, using the mirror of true sight and Kruglor's cutting power to defuse its traps. They discover a room filled with an antimagic field and containing a mind flayer despair stone suspended above a pit with thin, razor-edged ledges. After much debate, the appearance of a future Kruglor who lobs a femur at himself and disappears, and the dropping of one of the stair slabs into the hole, they decide to attempt to destroy the stone. Fab Dick's first attempt to blow it up is unsuccessful, after which Ashra throws a rainbow flask at it, smashing it and releasing a wave of despair which strikes Kruglor and Claire. The party regroups and finds Claire nearly catatonic; Ashra revives her somewhat by Suggesting "Calm down, because Ethan will take care of things." :The party makes it to the other side of the despair room and finds themselves in a long hallway with a tapestry bearing Olidamarra's symbol at the other end. Inspection of the other side with the mirror of true sight reveals different images to different party members: Tiamat to Ethan, a house full of femurs (including that of the tarrasque) to Kruglor, a white horse in an alleyway to Fab Dick, cancerous lungs to Snake, and endless gears to Ashra. Claire is not allowed to see because of her general mental state, and for the first and hopefully last time, Ashra says "honey." Beyond the tapestry is a secret door, through which lies a pit with the final mirror in the mirror puzzle. Once aligned, the mirrors will open another door near the chess puzzle once night falls. Episode Three: It's Zoroaster Jones! Squee! :The party returns to the chess puzzle and attempts to rest until nightfall, only to be surprised by the approach of an army of bugbears with siege engines. When Kruglor's attempts to scare them off prove unsuccessful, the party attempts to escape down a ditch into the chamber with the emotion stone only to discover a trap blowing tons of sand into that room. With no alternative, many nukes are dropped and the army is eventually neutralized. The army is identified as bearing the standard of Queen Rebexil of Goneril, which the party appropriates. :A strange darkness descends early over the land and the moon shines, opening the new entrance, which the party takes. Through a tiny door at the bottom, the party discovers a statue which Claire identifies as Zoroaster Jones, legendary drow adventurer. When the moonlight falls on the statue, it animates, and he introduces himself to the party. A beholder then rushes into the room and yells at everyone to run. Almost everyone does, but Baudin, having read that beholders hate sound, stays behind to throw bombs at it, while Kruglor stays behind because he's Kruglor. Kruglor grabs the beholder and dimension-dies his way into the Positive Energy Plane (aka Elemental Plane of Europop), where he licks the beholder and is slowed and charmed for his troubles. Upon their return, they join the party in fleeing from what is identified as an older and scarier beholder. With no help from Zoroaster Jones, who thinks it's "more of an adventure" not to assist, they make their way to the music room along with the beholder, who collapses the passages into the room to give them time. :The room contains a large organ, on which Ethan and Claire attempt to play the strange scroll of music they picked up in the stairs. It is not chess notation. They eventually manage to use it to produce a song that kills beholders, though the one who had been offering the party tea and cookies made of random materials is saved by Claire's quick use of Deep Slumber. A hole in one organ pipe also opens. The party decides to keep the beholder as Claire's mount, and begin to refer to him as Herr Doctor. They make use of the music room's relative safety to rest. Episode Four: Dargon Time :After resting, Claire awakes to find she was using Snake as a blanket. That sorted out, Herr Doctor clears the debris from the entrance to the music room and the party discovers the looted body of the big beholder with two scrolls: one a map of beholders' eye rays and the other beginning "I prepared..." One explosion later, the party hears something making a ticking sound and discovers that something is probably psionically shielding its consciousness from Ashra's thought-dar. They decide to beat a hasty retreat up the organ pipe. Kruglor discovers a spike stuck into the pipe and removes it, deafening everyone in the party except Ethan but not sparing him telepathic scolding from his fellow party members. :The party walks for a long time along the pipe in silence (as far as they know) and eventually discover an enormous room with a sleeping, apparently dead red dragon and a bunch of mosaics. They attempt to conceal this from Ethan while deciding what to do, but he figures it out pretty quickly anyway. The dragon wakes up and they decide to take it on. Claire rides Herr Doctor on the long drop from the organ pipe to the ground, while Ethan accepts a piggyback ride from Ashra to shouts of "Yippie-kie-yay, motherfucker!" and "Fuck, Ethan, when did you get so heavy?!" respectively. Kruglor, left without a corresponding floating aberration to ride, uses a combination of rope, grappling hook, and spike to get down some of the way, then leaps onto the dragon axe-first. It responds to this cordial introduction by scraping him off on the ceiling; he rolls the dice as he plummets toward the floor and ends up high above the Outlands, where he tackles air elementals in an attempt to slow himself down. As the dragon throws around breath attacks and Ethan heads for the puzzle, Kruglor reappears in time to shatter his right arm into little bits of pain. Herr Doctor nearly dies from the breath attack and is healed by Ashra while the dragon takes off to go one on one against Ethan as Claire attempts to solve the puzzle. The dragon and Ethan trade breath weapons and Neg Balls as Claire and Herr Doctor work out the counting-memory game necessary to keep the dragon from reappearing after it is killed. Ashra heals Kruglor, convinces him to chug a vial of wolves milk, and points the coked-up barbarian at the dragon. He deals the finishing blow, exploding the dragon and his weapon as his axe's final rune activates. :Claire and Herr Doctor manage to solve the puzzle of the mosaics just in time to prevent a second dragon from reappearing, and the party investigates the statue of High Lord Xentaroth (creepy! and anachronistic...) and the reliquary, which is full of lovely treasure. The Xentaroth statue has a real gem in his staff, which appears to be a phylactery, and as most party members settle in to rest, Ethan bribes Kruglor to chip away at the statue with his newfound hammer of Moradin. Some hours later, they freeze the statue and shatter it, earning Ethan a cool stone staff. :As the party rests, an ettin approaches and Kruglor and Ashra start out to deal with it. Ashra mind blasts it and Kruglor, accidentally allowing it to beat up Kruglor with its boxing gloves. Back with the rest of the party, Claire shoots at the general area of the commotion and resets the dragon-summoning puzzle by accident, but manages to fix it before any harm is done. Ashra eats one of the ettin's brains and watches it flop around, then tips over Kruglor for good measure. the next morning, the party opens a trapdoor in the reliquary and starts down the staircase below... :(Note: Sucky title, I know. Couldn't quite bring myself to use "Garbage day!" but maybe I should have. Er, please replace it if you can think of a better one.) '' Episode Five: Interview with a Nine-Hundred Year Old Lich'' :Kruglor serves as the party's coalmine canary by running cheerfully down the stairs ahead of everyone else. He finds a door, opens it, and upon finding a hallway full of doors runs down the hall knocking on every one. One mind blast later, the party discovers that the rooms are full of zombies and the barbarian should be allowed to move again. Ethan claims a few zombies for his own, and the rest of the party defeats the remainder with relatively little trouble. Herr Doctor attempts to turn one zombie to stone, only to turn it accidentally to brass instead thanks to a two. :In one room the party finds a strange set of runes, and in another, the party finds a sarcophagus in which lies a demi-lich who claims to be from a time which would make him approximately nine hundred years old. He paralyzes Herr Doctor and zaps Kruglor, but is friendly once he gets his bearings, and Ashra and Ethan proceed to talk to him in Infernal. He pretends that Herr Doctor's antimagic eye is still in effect by counterspelling the party's spells, and claims not to speak Common, though he probably actually does. :While they're talking, Kruglor slips off down the hall and discovers a group of people going after some Frozen Fates down below. Upon returning, he agrees to use this information to get the lich out of the room as long as Ashra doesn't get to know what he found out. The party agrees, and the lich thunders off downstairs to deal with the intruders. The party decides to defend the fates themselves as well. Just then, the speakstone rings and Vishnu, drunk, tells the party that the revolution has succeeded. The party has a morale surge which heals them and recharges their spells, and after some quick party buffs Claire Dimension Doors everyone to the frozen fate room. They find themselves up against Tyro, Poetry, what appears to be High Regent Xentaroth, and ... the demi-lich, who has apparently been convinced to join forces with them. Many truly awful rolls later, Claire is mind-blasted, many wands go off to little effect, Baudin nearly gets his brain eaten by Xentaroth, and Claire steals everyone's kill to finish off Poetry. Ethan defends the frozen fate statues from a group of flaming outsiders (not that kind of flaming). Ashra nearly eats Tyro's brain. Everyone gets very tired and is almost out of resources. Episode Six:'' Interview Redux'' :Rewind to the meeting with the demi-lich as the party decides to try again when some of them can roll over a five. Ashra and Ethan speak to him in Celestial and discover that he is probably significantly younger than he seems. The demi-lich notices Baudin has an amulet piece and is unconvinced that it's a fake, but is distracted by other questions. Baudin and Kruglor take Herr Doctor outside and look at the runes, which Ashra and Claire recognize as signifying the Fibonacci sequence because they are mathematical geniuses. After feeding zombies to Herr Doctor, Baudin and Kruglor manage to sufficiently disgust the lich that he appreciates the party closing the door, though the lead lining prevents any telepathic communication by the party. Ethan, Ashra and Claire interview the lich on what is going on while Baudin and Kruglor tow Herr Doctor on a rope down the hall. :The intrepid adventurers run straight into Tyro and Poetry's sneak attacks, and Kruglor sends the three to another plane. They find blue flowers and an enormous cat, which Herr Doctor, newly unparalyzed, charms into submission before their return. Meanwhile, the lich-chatting group hears Kruglor's scream and sets off to find their comrades. Ethan convinces the demi-lich that the party will help defend the fates, while Claire discovers (through translation) that her dreams are of a fate which will take her over if she goes entirely crazy in the Ruins. :Kruglor, Baudin, Herr Doctor and the cat return, and Kruglor, still extremely wounded, plane shifts away again. This time he ends up in the Outlands, in the wreckage of Boccob's temple, standing in front of Boccob himself. (Not like Boccob cares.) He attempts to lick Boccob and, for his troubles, is made first extremely gay and then extremely straight, undressed and relieved of all items in his inventory, highly aroused, and then sent back to the Material Plane with only his hammer to the god's sweet whisper of "fuck you." :Meanwhile, the party fights black-armored mooks, and Baudin is knocked unconscious. High Regent Xentaroth appears, causing the demi-lich to kneel in fealty and then attack the party. Xentaroth's mind blast does not affect the party members, but freezes the Very Large Cat. Upon return, Kruglor ejaculates while spinning around, revealing Poetry behind him. He grabs her and plane shifts away. Claire and Ashra fight "Xentaroth," who is revealed by the mirrors to be Tyro in a magical disguise, while Baudin nearly bleeds to death. Ethan tries to convince the lich that this is not the real Xentaroth, and succeeds once Tyro is killed and reverts to his previous form. :Meanwhile on another plane, Kruglor rapes Poetry. He returns to the Prime Material Plane, barely alive, and she eventually escapes and runs away. :More mooks arrive, accompanied by Marcus Fairlan and Sazuko Udina, and visible in the frozen fate room is Brescar, standing in a summoning circle, about to kill the prince. Ashra floats over the cat and pretends to be Grax, scaring the mooks away from her and from Kruglor, currently surviving on wolf's milk and rage. Marcus runs over to the nearly dead Baudin, grabs him, and teleports away. Claire uses a necklace of Time Stop for great justice, dimension dooring next to Brescar and filling his head with crossbow bolts to save the prince. As she begins to lead him out of the room, Sazuko runs after him, only to be blocked by a trip from Claire and a giant zombie from Ethan. Claire (?) finishes him off as the demi-lich runs into the frozen fate room and uses a Limited Wish to collapse the room and seal the fates, and himself, away forever. :The zombie barely pulls the prince to safety and the ruins begin to come down. Ethan grabs Tyro's necklace as the party prepares to Plane Shift away, then the eyes of the statue of High Regent Xentaroth open... ---- Previous Season: Eon: Legends of the Ages (Summer 2009) This season is in progress! Stay tuned! ---- Characters Starring: *Ethan of Malvont *Ashra *Claire Returning: *Baudin Dommilan (last seen in Eon: The Jade Warriors (Spring 2008) ) *Kruglor (last seen in Eon: Infinite Horizons (Summer 2008) ) Introducing: *Herr Doctor With a Very Special Guest Star: *Fab Dick